Starting With an SSS-Rank Goddess Summon!

Chapter 119: Reina’s Pitch

"I read your pitch..." Silas said, resting his forearms on the desk.

He leaned forward, giving her his full undivided attention. "A reinforced Beast Pen to break Umbral Wolves and transition the scouts into a fast-travel cavalry unit. It’s an ambitious idea..."

Lyra swallowed hard. Her defenses kicked in.

If he was going to shoot her down, she wasn’t going to go out without fighting for her class.

"It’s not just ambitious, my Lord, it’s a logistical necessity," Lyra blurted out, her words rushing out in a nervous but passionate stream. "I’ve mapped the patrol routes. The human body can only cover so much ground in heavy mud before exhaustion makes them vulnerable. Umbral Wolves have wide, padded paws that don’t sink. They have a natural thermal resistance to the cold rain. If you let me trap them, I don’t use violence to break them... My class skills allow me to establish a tether and I can simply converse with them. Once I claim the alpha role, the rest of the pack falls in line. We can saddle them within a week. It will change how this entire territory operates."

She finally ran out of breath and clamped her mouth shut with her chest heaving slightly.

She stared at him, terrified that she had just overstepped her bounds and talked back to her Lord.

Silas didn’t say anything.

He slowly lowered the piece of paper to the desk. He dropped his gaze, staring down at the wood in total silence.

The seconds ticked by. The only sound in the room was the wind rattling the wooden shutters.

Lyra’s heart sank straight into her stomach.

’I ruined it...’ her inner voice whispered in pure panic. ’I talked too much. I sounded arrogant. He hates the idea. He’s going to send me back to the mud with a spear and tell me to shut my mouth.’

She gripped the fabric of her trousers, her eyes burning with a sudden humiliating sting of rejection.

She prepared herself for the inevitable dismissal.

Silas slowly raised his head.

He looked at her, and the genuine bright smile that broke across his face completely stopped her heart.

"This is amazing," Silas said, his voice carrying zero mockery and only pure excitement.

Lyra blinked, completely stunned. "What?"

"I’m serious," Silas laughed, shaking his head and tapping the paper with his finger. "It’s absolutely brilliant. I’ve been sitting in this chair for a week stressing over how to expand our mapping grid without getting the scouts killed by exhaustion, and the answer was sitting right in my own barracks... Cavalry mounts. It’s a massive upgrade, and I didn’t even think of it."

He didn’t just validate her idea. He praised it and he openly admitted that she had thought of something he hadn’t.

The hardened shell surrounding Lyra’s heart cracked instantly.

He wasn’t playing favorites with the elites... He had read her messy charcoal-written note, understood the value of her class, and brought her up here to treat her like a real asset.

Silas stood up from his chair.

He walked around the heavy ironwood desk, stopping right in front of her.

He leaned back against the edge of the wood, crossing his arms and looking down at her with that same warm easy smile.

"You said you need timber and a reinforced perimeter wall near the east gate, right?" Silas asked with his golden-ringed eyes looking directly into hers.

Lyra couldn’t breathe properly.

Up close, without the distance of the training yard between them, the undeniable magnetism of his presence hit her like a physical blow.

The broad width of his shoulders, the deep rumble of his voice, the way he actually looked at her like she mattered... it was overwhelming.

All of a sudden, she completely understood exactly why the archers in the yard or rather everybody couldn’t stop talking about him.

A hot blush exploded across her cheeks, spreading down her neck and making her ears burn.

Her heart thumped so wildly against her ribs she thought he might actually hear it in the quiet office.

"Would you like to work with me to start building it right now?" Silas offered, tilting his head slightly.

Her entire perspective of the Lord of the Blessed Land flipped on its axis in a single second.

Lyra stared up at his beautiful smile as she was now hopelessly captivated.

"Y-yes," Lyra stammered.

"Alright then, let’s go."

The walk down the stone stairs of the Keep was quiet, but Reina couldn’t stop her heart from hammering against her ribs.

She walked half a step behind Silas, clutching the hem of her dirty canvas shirt to keep her hands from trembling.

Ten minutes ago, she had been standing in the muck of the training yard, poking a wooden dummy with a spear and cursing her luck.

Now, she was walking alongside the Lord of the Blessed Land himself, personally tasked with building out the military cavalry expansion she had designed on a scrap piece of paper.

They reached the ground floor and stepped out into the main corridor that led toward the rear courtyard.

As they passed the wide archway of the Keep’s kitchen wing, a rich mouth-watering smell washed over them.

It smelled like roasted wolf flanks, crushed peppercorns, and bubbling garlic butter.

"Hold on a second," Silas said, pausing at the archway. "I need to tell Kaelia we’re adding another plate to lunch."

Reina stopped behind him and peered into the kitchen. What she saw made her eyes widen in shock.

The Keep’s kitchen was massive, lined with clean stone counters and heavy iron hearths.

Standing at the center island was Kaelia, the territory’s shy soft-spoken master chef, nervously holding a wooden ladle.

And standing on either side of her, actively dueling over two massive boiling iron pots, were the two most terrifying entities in the entire Blessed Land.

To the left stood Morwenna, the Dread Queen of the Astral Seas.

She had her dark, wild hair tied back with a greasy rag, her sleeves rolled up over her thick biceps, and she was aggressively stirring a bubbling red stew with a heavy wooden spoon like she was rowing a warship.

To the right stood Eluned, the Goddess of Nature.

Her silver hair was braided cleanly out of the way, a spotless linen apron tied around her slender waist, and she was meticulously measuring out dried forest herbs into a delicate clear broth with precision.

Reina’s jaw dropped.

These were the two summons who had sliced a Corrupted Boss in half without blinking during the mining raid.

They were untouchable beings who usually commanded the battlefield with cold authority.

Yet here they were, wearing aprons and arguing over seasoning like domestic housewives.

"You’re scorching the base, you heavy-handed pirate," Eluned sneered without looking up from her broth. "If you boil the garlic at that heat, it turns bitter... You lack basic culinary refinement."

"Shut up and watch your own weeds, princess," Morwenna grunted, bumping Eluned’s hip with her own. "The Captain burns six thousand calories a day swinging heavy iron. He doesn’t want fancy leaf-water. He wants meat, spice, and potatoes that stick to his ribs."

"Both smell great," Silas interrupted smoothly, stepping into the kitchen.

The bickering instantly ceased.

Both SSS-rank women snapped their heads toward the doorway. The cold competitive glare on their faces melted away in a split second, replaced by wide bright smiles as they saw their Lord.

Reina shrank back slightly, intimidated just by standing in the same room as them.

She noticed Kaelia offering a shy, polite bow from behind the counter with her cheeks dusted pink as she nodded a greeting to Reina.

"We’re heading out to the east wall to lay the groundwork for a new military project," Silas told the room, gesturing to the recruit standing behind him. "Reina pitched a Beast Pen design so we’re going to trap Umbral Wolves and build a cavalry unit."

He turned his head toward the hallway behind him. "Aeliana, you’re with us. I need your eyes on the perimeter wards while we construct."

Aeliana stepped into view from the corridor, her clipboard held against her chest, her silver bangs falling cleanly over her forehead.

"At once, Lord Sy. My spells are at your disposal."

To Reina’s utter amazement, neither the Dread Queen nor the Goddess raised a single word of complaint about their Lord walking off with a mid-tier recruit.

Instead of acting jealous or possessive, they simply adjusted their aprons.

"Good luck with the build, My Lord," Eluned purred, her green eyes softening with genuine affection.

She lifted her hand to her lips and blew him a delicate kiss across the kitchen table. "Don’t work too hard in the dirt. Come back soon for lunch~"

Morwenna didn’t let that slide. The pirate queen smirked, leaning her heavy hips against the stone counter and blowing him her own loud, highly deliberate kiss.

"Yeah, Captain, come back soon," Morwenna rasped with her voice dropping into a shameless whisper that echoed clearly across the room. "And make sure you save some energy... I need you to bath me again tonight so you can touch me down there and release all my pent-up stress~"

The kitchen went dead silent for a fraction of a second.

Reina’s face instantly burned a violent shade of crimson.

Her brain short-circuited as she processed what the Dread Queen had just casually announced to the entire room.

Aeliana, standing right beside Silas, stiffened visibly. Her silver eyes darkened, her lips pressing into a razor-thin trembling line as her fingers dug into the wood of her clipboard.

"Morwenna!" Eluned shrieked, her own face turning bright red as she slammed her wooden spoon down onto the counter. "Stop acting like a pervert in front of the girls! Have you no shame?!"

"None at all!" Morwenna laughed boisterously, stirring her stew with renewed vigor.

Silas just sighed, shaking his head with the weary resignation of a man who had completely given up on controlling the woman’s social filter.

He offered Kaelia a quick nod who wished them a quiet...

"G-good luck, my Lord!"

From behind her pots and turned around to lead Reina and Aeliana out of the Keep.

They walked across the sprawling, black-tiled courtyard toward the eastern perimeter of the Blessed Land.

The territory was massive, but Silas had kept the layout clean and modular.

The Warlord Garrison sat on the northern side near the training yards, the Keep dominated the center, and the eastern flank was a wide open expanse of smooth stone tiles bordered by the towering steel-weave perimeter walls.

They stopped roughly two hundred yards from the main east gate.

"Alright," Silas said, stopping in the center of the empty tiled square.

He looked around, checking the distance from the barracks and the main paths. "Why here, Reina? Break down the logistics for me."

Reina took a breath, forcing her embarrassing memories of the kitchen out of her head and locking back into her Beast Tamer expertise.

"Three reasons, Lord Silas," Reina explained, pointing toward the heavy iron gates to their left. "First is scent and wind direction. The Umbral Basin’s prevailing winds blow from the west... By placing the Beast Pen on the far eastern edge of the tiles, any smell from the wolves or the feed troughs gets blown directly out into the forest, not back across the barracks or the Keep."

She turned and pointed toward the Warlord Garrison looming in the distance.

"Second is response time," she continued with her confidence growing as Silas listened intently. "It’s roughly a two-minute sprint from the Garrison to this spot. When the scouts wake up for their morning patrols, they don’t have to cross the entire base to saddle their mounts. They exit the barracks, grab their wolves here, and ride straight out the east gate into the hunting grid."

She gestured to herself. "And third... My quarters are in the east wing of the barracks. I can easily walk over here first thing in the morning and last thing at night to feed the pack, check the snares, and maintain the tethers without disrupting the drills."

Silas nodded slowly, a genuine look of respect in his golden-ringed eyes. "That’s clean and efficient. I like it."

He reached into his pocket and pulled out his small, leather-bound Beginner Lord Guidebook... the standard issue manual he had gotten quite a while ago.

He flipped through the basic pages, passing the entries for simple wooden fences and dirt ditches, looking for the baseline Beast Pen requirements.